


these dead men walk on water

by thatyourefuse



Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: Biting, Bloodplay, Brother/Sister Incest, Consent Issues, Cunnilingus, Dream Sex, F/M, Gratuitous Pathetic Fallacy, Hand porn, I don't know what show you've been watching, Magic Realism, Menstruation, POV Alternating, Rough Sex, Steve Knight's river fetish, Writing on the Body, YES IN THE SAME SCENE, and therefore, canon-typical gender fuckeduppedness, canon-typical overwrought emotion, dire insinuations, do you think death could possibly be a boat?, don't say i didn't warn ya, if you aren't already aware that Zilpha has, in before 1.04 aw yesssss, miscellaneous disturbing imagery, really weird pillow talk, unsuitable behavior for small watercraft, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 07:47:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9481616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatyourefuse/pseuds/thatyourefuse
Summary: The darkest need, the slowest speed/The dead unreconciled





	

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

EMILY BRONTE

 

But to talk of mind and body begs the question.

Soul is the place,  
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,  
where such necessity grinds itself out.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.

ANNE CARSON

\---

 

And Zilpha Geary lies with her brother in the bottom of a narrow boat drifting rudderless down a langourous mist-choked river. Her black silk gown has been undone and spread out to cover pitchy creaking boards; she lies naked to the wet caressing air with its tints of green-gold sunlight. The current sways them like a cradle, gentle and implacable as breath, and she lies with her cheek against James' shoulder. 

Before her eyes his skin shifts colors like the scudding of wind-blown clouds: blue gives way to white; sallow to sun-scorched; deep scars rise and subside like distant waves.

"How have you done this?" she asks. There is fury in the back of her throat, a taste like paper-smoke and cider vinegar; but she feels nothing, save the over-close caress of the air.

"You wanted me to come," he says: his voice that new foreign rasp, burred and cadenced like broken music. She opens her mouth to demur. "For years. You did. You never could lie to me out in the world. So I wouldn't try it here."

"We all want things we mustn't have." Water tugs and plashes at the side of the boat, rocking them up over a low soft swell. When she opens her eyes entirely, thin lines of script scrawl and fade themselves across James' skin. She knows his clawing hand, and her own. "And we all come to hate that which we want. And I have left off hating you."

"And so you feel nothing," he says. "Towards anyone. Is that the way?"

"It will be," she says. She had not meant to tell the truth.

"Hm." His broad coarse fingers twine themselves through a damp-curled stray lock of hair. "Come with me when I go. Anywhere you like. Canada, Canton, Cabinda. It won't matter to me so long as it's out of this stinking city with you."

"And we'd be happy?" she says: an ancient refrain, decade-old and older. Her irony dies on her tongue.

"Forever more." He bows his head to kiss her shoulder, his mouth soft as it ever was against fever-cold skin. "Forever and a night and a day."

He kisses her unresisting mouth; the notch of her throat; laps chilly sweat from the shallow plane of her breastbone. Desire licks its long tongues through her: like oil-fire, like brandy, like poison; she stretches her arms out cruciform and accepts him, and he murmurs strange-shaped words as he kisses down between her breasts.

"Why can't I understand you?" she says, casting her eyes up to the indeterminate sky.

James lifts his head, humid-breathed with nosing beneath her arms. The shadow of a broad-winged bird, as seen from great distance, lifts into flight across his cheek and soars away.

"Because I'm here," he says.

His fingertips are black with soot and ash: he draws them skimming down the line of her flank, tracing in the borders of her body. Black-smudged lines to delineate the hollows between each rib; black like day-old bruises to shade in the undercurves of her breasts. The marks do not come away on his skin where it touches hers. 

His soft mouth suckles at her nipple, taking in almost the entirety of the flesh, and she clutches the back of his neck and opens her thighs. She gives way.

*

James Delaney pins his sister back against the colorless boards of a river-boat. Her face is hidden in the wind-caught shadows of a black lace funeral veil; her skirts are hitched up high and the hot live smell of her body rises into the air, to mingle with rot and smoke and broken flesh. The sky is grey and clear to the stripped horizon, a pale wind biting at the skin; and when he spreads her cunt between his thumbs, the lovely folds of her are vivid with deep red blood.

Her hips bow up into his girdling hands, her back arching and arching, and he lowers his mouth. She tastes of iron and seawater, foul and rich and deep; he licks her arse to apex in broad wet strokes, and the black-robed man perched up in the stern of the boat does not turn his head to her reverberant cries.

"I did hate you," she says, her low voice faint — so sweet, so gentle, the sound of her, even between the teeth of her cruelest pleasures; and he has known them cruel indeed. "I believe I still do."

He lifts his head, his mouth slick-heavy with her blood; it runs in satiny rivulets from the corner of his lips and still he wants more: wants every hidden hot part of her, wants her clever fingers ripping him open and plunging wrist-deep into his vitals. He wants them indivisible.

"I know," he says. "Let me see your face."

"I don't understand." Her skirts are China silk hemmed in lustrous black-dyed fox fur and the cold wind tips them slithering down over his elbow-bared arms; he has been so long away from those sensations he always knew as love.

"Show me your face," he says, "so I can be certain it's you."

Slender her little kid-gloved hand, peeling the veil free and giving it up to the air; slender and pale her face, her wide eyes gleaming like one candleflame thrown back from twinned black mirrors. When she was a girl she would be freckled like a plover's egg and her hems all draggled in mud; in a clean dress with her hair brushed back she would have the wary wild-eyed look of a conspirator. He would love most to disarrange her.

"You know it's me," she says, staring down at him. "You have always known."

The man in the stern, unresponsive, sculls his oar one side and another. The boat glides on, captive to the sluggish tide; from bow to sky the river is bare of other craft, and bone-bitter air encloses them like a flaw in a jewel.

"I have," James replies; he catches her right hand between both his own and bares the fine fair skin along her wrist, parting glove from sleeve-cuff. He presses his lips against the stammering pulse; leaves a wet red imprint over her twisting blue-green veins. Her skin drinks it up as blotting-paper might take ink, and shows the creeping mark just as bravely. "It changes. What I know, what I've seen. But I always do understand who you are."

"I wonder." She twitches her sleeve down; lies back; raises her skirts again. Blood smudges down her thighs, almost obscuring the yellowed unfamiliar bruises. Twinned one side to the other, five and five, measuring out the spread of a man's hand. Little bird, little skin-dazed snake. "I wonder whether you ever did?"

"I knew you," he said — licks his mouth — "before either of us was born."

*

Zilpha anchors smutty fingernails — so unlike the hands of Thorne Geary's wife — into rotting wood, and shoves her body up to James' mouth. His tongue scores and profanes her, turns her blood to steam and her bones to jellied broth, and her dry mouth opens and opens around a cry that will not voice. She shudders into her pleasure with a violence that gaffs out the air from her and makes of her skin a live starved thing, and falls back shaking against the rags of her gown.

Birds sing unseen in the mist: a linnet, a sedge warbler, all familiar as loneliness on a Sunday; and the boat drifts.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you mean," she says, when her voice returns.

James, his mouth glistening, looks up along the ash-marked expanse of her. "Of course you do," he says — absent, infuriating — and scrubs a careless hand into his hair. It leaves behind no stain. "That's the other side of it. You," and his forefinger marks a single inky whorl on the skin just above her mound, "know me. And you know what I'm going to do."

"You're going to unleash Hell." She turns her face away; and from the corner of one eye a glint of cheap bright color finds the light. In the cracks of the faded boards are wedged a hand-scatter of beads: red and black and white. She wonders from where they fell.

James shakes his head, the small motion re-drawing her eye. She sees her own looped signature flicker across his cheek as his tonguetip sweeps the corner of his mouth.

"Send her home," he says. "Zilpha Annabel Delaney, now Zilpha Annabel Geary. Send that woman home to her lawful bed. I want to speak to my sister, who knows me."

She says: feels her soul lift dizzying against her bones: "You think you'll set everything right. And why did you come _here_ to do it?"

"To London?" He crouches up above her; the boat tremors and judders but does not tip. Across the bridge-span of his collarbone, in red ink that disrupts the skin like blood, is written the name _Sir Stuart Strange_. She knows the print-clean capitals, the tidy flourishes. "When you hunt a beast, you go where there is water."

"The East India," she says.

"The East India and the King and the Free fucking Fifteen." The name at the base of his throat does not fade as he begins to crawl up the length of her; but the ink ceases to shimmer, ceases to run, ceases to be ink, until the words are as white and gather-edged as an ancient scar. She scrolls her thumb across the lashing underscore for the satisfaction in feeling him bridle. "Whoever wants to stand in our way. Did you know your husband tried to buy our father's death?"

"It doesn't surprise me," she says. She cannot picture Thorne's face; only his silhouette in tipped hat and over-tailored coat, only his grasping hands. Her bitter pity for him has coated her tongue like a doctor's mixture until she swallows it with every bite and every breath. "I imagine he could hardly afford it."

"And he went to the wrong man, that time. Another time someone didn't."

The boat dips beneath them as James braces his hands either side of her throat. She is suddenly thankfully certain that after all none of this is real; that after all she would never allow this.

She says, "Father had enemies."

"I don't want to talk about him." He kisses her mouth, slowly: the salt-rime of herself on his tongue jars her with its familiarity. She remembers his unroughened fingers curled between her legs, remembers him holding them out to her. _I'll bet you sixpence you won't taste_. She tasted; she bit. "Or his enemies, save the one. You threw yourself away on Geary and so I shall only take pleasure in killing him, and not regret."

Her voice hatefully weak, she says, "What did you imagine I would do?"

"Cut off your hair and follow me." And now he does reach down between her legs; and now he does force her open, two fingers splitting her suddenly and the bright pain transmuting into trickling relief. "He told me what you do instead. Can the man tell a lie?"

*

He reads the answer in every inch of her, just as though he hadn't known it: her eyes vast, her little noise drowned out by the lunatic screeching of gulls. Her cunt tight-closed around his fingers like resistance, given contradiction by the eager tilt of her hips.

"Not to save his life," she says, all acid and rue. "But he can believe them."

"Do you lie to him?" The boatman cocks his head; his vein-proud raddled hands shift grip on the oar. A wisp of fine white hair flickers, wind-snatched, from the hood of his cloak. James does not lower his eyes; he does not forget the taut quick heat of her body beneath his; but he draws back his hand and kneels up to skin off his shirt. "This is no business, my love, but mine and yours, and yours is all I care for now, do you lie to him?"

"Not," she says, spreads her knees apart, opening up her hips' bone cradle beneath twining black silk, "with my body."

"With your protestations?" He slings the shirt out low to the wind; watches a wave lick up and take it and bear it away. Zilpha's eyes slide sidelong to its fluttering, and return to him. "Hm? With your little speeches? Do you proclaim to him as eloquently as you do to me?"

"Hardly." She sucks her lips into her mouth, top and then bottom; the kittenish point of her tongue is just understandable between. "He has God's right to me. My words are no requirement in the bargain."

Her breath comes in and out just in the shadow where her high black collar splits her throat. Little bird.

"I should hate," she says, "to be a man. I should hate to own the world and yet be always reaching after what was none of mine to take. I think it must be maddening, in the end."

The sides of the boat are gemmed with needles of fine smashed glass, with shards of white-and-blue porcelain. James does not trust that the edges are sunk too deep to cut; and yet they take water-wash light so prettily. They cast it back in pinpoints onto her skin.

"You forget that you and I are the same," he says. She begins to shake her head; he stills her with a palm to cup her temple. "I am you and you are me and do you like to say that you are none of your own?"

She drags his mouth down to hers. She kisses him. Her blood still clings to his lips, his beard, and when he lifts his head her mouth is a battlefield. Her hair ravels loose from its pins to snarl its way into splintery boards; when she moves, she flinches. He wants to see her do it again.

"Go back to Hell," she says.

"If there were such a place," he says, "I would no less love you."

Beneath him her narrow body seethes. Her thigh hitches round his hip, the boat trembles, the water beats against its side. He hears the boatman curse — sharp-voiced and dry — as her kid-dulled fingers clutch like mantraps against his shoulders.

"Not a degree," he says; the best incantation he knows, "and not a day, and not in any other kind. No less."

Her red-stained mouth is parted; her eyes wet fire.

"Do not make me promises," she whispers; and it breaks him.

He forces a hand down in between the crux of their bodies, and tugs his trouser buttons open. She turns her sweat-cold cheek into his hand, her hair snagged tight, her lashes falling closed; and time stretches out in blood-drummed silence between her one thin sobbing breath and her next. He might be sinking down through water too salt to freeze. It might be roaring in his chambered heart.

Her mouth holds a little helpless sound as he fucks into her, and he pushes his thumb between her teeth. She bites down.

*

She tastes blood — her teeth break skin — and her body is the scream he stifles, her body is a madhouse. His hand like a bit between her teeth; his weight borne in against the fragile hinge of her hips; all of her broken open to him, all of her aching to thrash and fight. All of her hotly, painfully grateful she cannot.

"I love you," he says, and she does scream. Her voice shoved back into her throat, the filth on his skin dissolving onto her tongue, and he laughs. He takes his hand away. "I do, I came back for you. Don't you believe me?"

"No," she says — he laughs again, he strokes her brow too gently. Ash smears between his fingers and her skin. "God _damn_ you, what is it you mean to do now?"

"Everything." He kisses her hair and shoves himself deeper inside her, hard enough to swing the boat in rhythm. Her voice goes up like the whine of a wounded thing. All the space from her throat to the core of her is filled with smoke rising, with harpstrings shivering tight, with the blind animal clutch of her flesh at his. "Everything we never could do before. Do you think I don't know what it is to be a dog on a chain?"

He presses his forehead down to hers and for a moment he is as young as the day he left, for a moment she is that girl: wet moss crushed into perfume beneath her back, a sly wind starting over her chilling skin. For a moment there is something she almost understands, and then James noses and bites just under the turn of her jaw; and she falls back into her own body with a breath-choked shock.

"They have tried to destroy us," he says, and sucks her bruising skin between his teeth. "And if you and I were dead in the ground a hundred thousand miles apart, they would not have succeeded."

She wants to say, _that is no longer what we are_. She wants to say, _I will not love you, I will not love you_. The words run dry on her tongue; and her body fits to his as lock to key, as sky to the horizon-line. She once believed that they were one and the same; that he was more a part of her than her own thoughts. That all her own thoughts were his.

"Leave me in peace," she whispers: and all at once her nerves sing and tighten, all at once her spine kindles like a fuse. She shakes straight through a peak too violent to feel — a storm outside the walls that sets the candles guttering — and James' words against her ear might be English or heathen or no human tongue at all. 

They end in _my love_ again, and she turns her face away, this time unhalted. The air around them, still blood-warm and bright, is stitched through with the small close snow of winter; flakes skim unmelting at the tearstained corner of her eye, settle over James' sweat-carved shoulders. When she blinks, they catch and quaver between her lashes: pinpoint-sharp with unchanging cold as James' body sears itself into hers.

Her back hitches in a little galvanic arch; James sighs across her skin. For the first time he sounds only peaceful, and she cannot bring herself to hear his voice. _Beautiful_ , he says, and rank words which ought to defeat her; ought to make her skin pull tight and prickle with avid disgust. Instead she feels light-boned, transported; and yet where her body should resign itself to his she is only tighter, wringing wet and still reluctant to yield. Every movement stings like a wound scoured out, like the soft advance of blood into long-numbed flesh after kneeling.

She will not tip over the edge again; she wants him never to stop; she does not know what creature she has made of herself.

"I wish you had stayed away," she says, hears her voice skew. "I wish you had let me sleep."

*

"I could never," he says. Struck for a dazed rising moment with the sight of her lying waxen, her nightdress gathered neatly in and her little breast rising and falling inhumanly slow; he buries his face against the birdbeat undeniable pulse beneath her jaw, and drives into her so sharply as to drop and buck the boat against the waves beneath them.

She keens in the back of her mouth. There are thin broken blades of grass knotted in her hair; a greensick smudge high up her cheek, bringing out its angles. The smell of springtime hangs on her skin, her body underneath his a vise-tight twist of flame, her body underneath his a current. The boatman's oar is slowing, and James bites hard at his sister's throat and does not open his eyes. He does not look to the shifting shadow that is the man putting back his hood. He does not see the face he already knows.

"Forgive me," he says, blind in her arms, her little wondering scream, "forgive me that I left you, forgive me what I was made, but do not forgive me what I will do or what I have done. Do not put yourself so far from me, do not make me other than I am —"

Wind whips about them and her bare hand slides along his neck, down to bury dainty talons in among the binding scars between his shoulders. Her thighs cord alongside his; her nails rake. Pain lights through him out of all proportion, carving him deep as claws, and he shakes and he shakes and his teeth pull sidelong at her mouth, snap up her thready cry. 

He comes off and everything stops.

The waves still at the sides of the boat, the wind drops like a hurricane's heart; the boat itself floats like a petal fallen in a bowl of water. Only Zilpha's body under his is live and stirring: at a restless sort of momentary ease, stretching her pretty legs, unfurling her arms out to her sides.

Air saws ragged edges through his throat. He lifts his head: he gazes down at her, at the shadowless light that lies unmoving across her face.

"You have done this," she says: her voice raw, faded, placid like a skim of ice above pouring black water. Her eyes so wide. "You have brought me here."

He says, "You and I."

Still she surrounds him: her ankle hooked up round his calf, her cunt wet and overspilling. The high lacelike flush mottling her skin; her hair the tangle of unspun silk she would once let fall from its pins across his face. Her mouth, its corners wavering between surrender and disgust. He will not look away.

*

And he wakes all wrapped in sweat-damp mended sheets; and she wakes lying still as death in her curtained bed, the thin grey dawn-light cutting razory through the windowpanes.

Her breath flutters winglike in her mouth. He scrubs a broad-boned wrist across his brow, cold salt stinging down to his eyes.

The dog is whining in the hall; the maid's soft careful footsteps strike a creaking board. The day opens out.

**Author's Note:**

> Title/summary: [The Hat et al — The Angry River](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QohZXA8wvIA)
> 
>  
> 
> So Episode 3 was basically a gift to me personally.
> 
> That is all.
> 
>  
> 
> (27.1.17)


End file.
